*What is the dark side of the Web, and how does it play into your paper about style and technology?*
The web offers many lures for those of weak character. These lures include hitching posts for pedophiles and neo-Nazis, pornography for faithless spouses, and scholarly research for the unscholarly.
The issue of unscholarly research is pertinent to my work as a composition instructor. Unscholarly research is tied in to my term project on ways to use technology to improve instruction for today's college students. Despicable websites such as studentoffortune.com are a daily reminder to first-year composition instructors that students who are unprepared for college often succumb to the lure of cheat sites that offer term papers and class assignments for sale. Students sell their assignments for a few dollars to future students. Plagiarism checkers fail to find these assignments as they are not published on the web. Students can graduate from freshman English with the same deficient skills they entered with.
Technological solutions and skill development are the only answers to bring students back from the dark side. My college has developed software that requires students to submit every piece of writing into a database at the time it is posted for grading. If a second student submits the same piece, a plagiarism flag will alert the instructor, and sanctions can be applied. The plagiarism checker works simultaneously with grammar and style-checking tools. As cheating generally occurs because students are unprepared for college, it can be reduced by skills instruction and sophisticated detection techniques.
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Gina,
ReplyDeleteOur institution uses a plagiarism detector as well: Turnitin.com. It sounds like yours is an "in-house" program?? Most of our instructors have found this service helpful, certainly in assisting in plagiarism detection. But some also use the feedback and grading portions of the program. Instead of using the comment/tracking tools in MSWord, instructors use similar tools in Turnitin. This makes it easier for both students and professors as the drafting, editing, and revising process is contained in one program.
I am not familiar with plagiarism software or with that site for plagiarized work. It is unfortunate that so many students take that route that such means are required. It seems like every time the system finds a way to stop such things, students find a new way to cheat. It would be so much better if they focused that effort to cheat on their actual work.
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